In recent years, to reduce management/maintenance costs of a server or an application installed in a company, attention has been paid to a cloud computing system that enables use of various applications operating on a server computer through the Internet.
A main feature of the cloud computing system is that data conversion or data processing is executed in a dispersion manner by using many computing resources to simultaneously process requests from many clients. At present, there are appearing many vendors that compete with one another to provide a wide variety of services by mounting web services on a cloud computing environment to achieve the cloud computing.
As devices linked with various services provided by the cloud computing, a printer and a digital multifunction peripheral (collectively referred to as an image forming apparatus) used when a paper medium is scanned to be computerized, and electronic data is printed can be used. In many cases, the image forming apparatus is installed in a company (intranet). As compared with a case where there are an image forming apparatus and an application in the intranet, when there is an application in the Internet, to closely connect both, a method that takes security such as a fire wall into consideration is necessary.
Google (registered trademark) has developed a mechanism of data communication to provide services by linking with the image forming apparatus, and released an interface that enables the image forming apparatus to carry out data communication with a cloud computing environment provided by the Google. A user wishing to use the services must register information of the image forming apparatus in the cloud computing environment, namely, a service environment for providing the services.
In many cases, the image forming apparatus installed in the company is shared by a plurality of users. To link image forming apparatuses with the services provided by the cloud computing, users must register information of the same image forming apparatus in the service environment. However, when the information of the image forming apparatus that each user has registered in the service environment is updated, information of all the users who have registered the image forming apparatuses in the service environment must be updated. This generates many processes and communications.
As a conventional example to solve the problem, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2002-073304 discusses a data processing method for storing setting registration files including a set of various print setting values separately for the users, and enabling selective displaying of registration information set by an administrator user. According to the data processing method, various print setting values set by the administrator user can be shared, and latest information regarding the image forming apparatus can be shared by transmitting a registration change message to all the users.
In recent years, from the standpoint of reducing total costs of ownership (TCO), to suppress a reduction of information leakage danger and an increase of costs, there has been proposed a method that can restrict various functions of the image forming apparatus for each group to which the user belongs. However, in the conventional example, various print setting values of the image forming apparatus registered in the service environment by an administrator to be shared are displayed as user's setting values even when it is unclear whether other users can also use the setting values. This is a first problem.
There is no method proposed to efficiently manage setting values registered in a printing service system. This is a second problem.